For who, intermediate players (clearing difficulty 800-2000%) looking to improve their score. I'm a Beat Hazard veteran with over 300 hours across Beat Hazard 1, 2 and 3; but am far from the best (i cannot touch highly contested world records).

Scope not for Boss Rush nor Survival game modes

Set-up (pre-requisites) mother ship have (fully upgraded): Instant Beat Hazard, military Care Package (as many as possible). Armory: Cascade Bomb (1/8/6/7), either EMP Virus (6/0/8/8) or Reflect Shield (0/8/0/8); adjust points to preference. Shield duration is crucial (bomb and reflect shield). Bomb damage is crucial. My weapon stats are not completely optimized (could do with less pick-ups for most songs). (properly using) Armory weapons are more important than ship stats, they are by far the most powerful tools you have. Ship elites are worth it (stat boost) but not required. Pick a ship you like, spend all tuning points. Rough guidelines: have >13 DPS (the least important but makes it easier), Pick-up force where they float to you with reasonable speed so you can, more or less, stay in one spot (for my experience: around 80% or way higher, no in between. You do not want them to shoot past you when moving), have good handling (deceleration) as you will need to micro adjust your position a lot; drift is deadly. Ensure your darkbeam can kill shields fast enough (e.g. 1-2 shielded purple laser ships per overheat); if you do not run EMP Virus. Smaller ships are easier to dodge with, i prefer <60 width. I prefer a wide beam pattern to more easily clear missiles, downside: no (less) precision and spread DPS for bosses. Pick your poison. Dodging is easier if your ship can outrun missiles and tracking lasers.

This is what i use, not the best (stat wise) but i like it (50% for the name, 50% for the ship). The elite is bad though.

Ensure to enable email notification in-game so you know when your score is beaten.

Whether you are using a controller or keyboard and mouse has no impact on your ability to get world records.

Simplified: (multiplier) x (killed stuff) = score. The higher your multiplier when killing stuff the more score you get for killing it, simple.

Multipliers are obtained
a) through drops when killing things. Pick up EVERY SINGLE ONE. +10's are worth risking for or spending a reflect shield to get them; yes multiplier drops are that important.
b) through "Dare Devil" (+5) and "Survivor" (+2?) which effectively entails: not shooting, nor using armory weapons, for a few seconds and staying alive while there are enemies.

Multiplier drops are fixed (deterministic) per song, i.e. everyone gets the same multipliers . There some sort of "drop queue" system behind the scenes, which "unlock" drops (multiplier/weapon drop) at certain time-points in the song, however you only get them when you kill stuff. This is why, after not killing anything for a while, you suddenly you will get a lot of drops at once on your first few kills. This is useful as picking up a single blob of drops is easier as opposed to them be scattered across the screen. The drop queue mechanic also implies running more weapons types and/or higher weapon drop rates will reduce your multiplier drops; not good.
This explanation is a simplification. There is another, more advanced, way to increase the number of multiplier drops: kill more stuff; see below.

There is a soft multiplier cap, from 450 onward you will lose multipliers every second. The higher your multiplier (above 450) the faster you loose them. Individual multiplier pickups become a little less important when at this stage (no longer risk it all for a +5); especially if there is nothing to be killed immediately. Picking up queued multipliers at once becomes much more important (only way to significantly push above 450 for a short while).

By comparing/tracking your multipliers to others throughout the song you can get a feel how well you are doing. Especially in the beginning it is much more important to have the same/higher multiplier than it is to have the same/higher score. As it is not linear but exponential, higher multiplier results in much higher score. For longer songs it is a race to hit the soft cap first after which it becomes execution since a large part of the song will be spend around max multiplier. Therefor it matters less if you reach it is e.g. 3 minutes or 3 minutes and 20 seconds; except for world records.

Killing stuff, songs are deterministic*. Everybody will get the same number, type and ship spawn patterns for the same song when using the same difficulty. It (number) does differ per difficulty (%) but for chasing high scores everybody uses the highest, 2000%, thus this is in practice not a thing (there was a time where lower difficulties could yield higher scores with the right tactic). Asteroids are spawned random but the amount is the same. So long story short, everybody has the same potential sources of points. In practice it suffers from the butterfly effect very quickly, especially for ships that shoot kill-able objects. Keeping those ships alive yields 2 (major) benefits: more stuff to kill == more points AND more drops (multipliers!). Unconfirmed but i believe kill-able object drops are not bound by the queue drop system or either way add drops to it. So even if the number and types of ships are the same for everybody, due to play style, the number of killed none-ship objects during a song are typically not which is the biggest source of variance in scoring!

There appears to be a cap of the maximum number of ships and missiles on screen, once reached no more things can spawn. This could skip bosses. The exact number is not known (?) but generally it is not reached when not aiming for it, thus not a concern.

*not true, you can change the spawned ship types at the start of the song by dodging longer/... but i cannot reliably reproduce it/do not understand how it works. Unknown to me if this can be done on all songs or only if the conditions are right.

The logical strategy thus becomes: kill as much stuff as possible with the highest possible multiplier. Killing a ship now with 100 multiplier is worse than killing the same ship later with 200 multiplier. Killing a ship spawning missiles right away is worse than killing all missiles over and over again and killing the ship at the end of the song. Now it becomes a question of skill, how much things on the screen can you tolerate (dodge, surgically kill, kite, ...) before killing them (while building up multiplier along the way).

Do not be afraid of enemies, see them as a source of points. More == better, enemies are good! Therefor world records are played at the highest difficulty (2000% -> more ships spawn).

All these strategies below are ways to: get multiplier as fast as possible and killing enemies while having the highest possible multiplier.

Armory weapon drops compete with multipliers, therefor only use 2 instead of 3. Using lower drop rate will help. Running out of weapons at the the wrong time will result in death. Or worse, at the end of the song will result in (a LOT of) lost score. Having too many means you have missed out on having more multiplier drops. Up to you to balance. I run 2 weapons with high drop rate (because lazy).

Start of the song daredevil (thus dodge) as long as possible, naturally you will be pushed to the side of screen as more enemies spawn. Here you have the highest risk of Asteroids killing you by coming from the off-screen area, try to keep at least a bit of space from the border or just YOLO (and restart a lot). Try to kite red photons, starter enemies shoot in straight lines. Let them almost hit you and move slightly out of the way. Tracking missiles will miss you if you slightly move left/right and go around you in a (rather) big circle wasting time and become a single group (easier to dodge). Be careful if they come from off the screen. The number of times you can daredevil depends on the spawn-set of the song and can differ widely. Tip: folding your ship may allow you to kite (dare devil) longer. Small ships obviously have a big advantage here.
If you can no longer hold it start killing (typically right after receiving a dare devil bonus). You will get many multipliers at once, and pick them up ASAP (and stop shooting until picked up), afterwards continue killing what you have to kill. Order matters here, this way you will get score for killing things with a higher multiplier compared to first killing and picking up later. ALWAYS prioritize picking up multipliers. In addition I try to kill Asteroids first to trigger the multiplier drops before killing ships (higher score). The start is crucial to getting a high score.
To easily detect others using this strategy, and for how long they dare devil, look for scores quickly shooting up from nothing at the start of the song. Look at their multiplier and compare it to yours.

Farming, i.e. killing kill-able objects without killing its source (ship/boss). Avoid shooting in their direction. This is the BIGGEST source of scoring differences. Each object will give you additional points and drops that you would otherwise not have gotten i.e. easier way to build up your multiplier early on. If they have a shield you are golden as you cannot accidentally kill hem. This also applies to bosses (especially starfish/octopus). Keep the boss AND its shield alive as long as possible while farming missiles also "delaying" it in the process. Pick up all drops as you go. You can kill the missiles right away or kite and kill them at once, it does not matter.
More and more enemies will spawn and at some point you will have to kill everything and/or will kill them accidentally. How long you can hold it depends on your skill level and the song spawn set.
You can somewhat detect others using this strategy when their score gets a sudden big jump (and there is no boss).

Delay kills, the higher your multiplier when you kill something the more points you get from it. So kite everything as long as you can hold it, you can use reflect shields to move around. Some ships are more a threat than others, which you will learn quick enough.
Often i'm rather lazy and kill every non-boss enemies that does not spawn kill-able objects a few seconds after spawning before it can even fire (and make my life harder). To maximize your score keep them alive as long as you can be bothered by. It is subjective, i hate shielded missiles and immediately kill them even though they could be farmed (costing me score).

End of the song typically i have super bombs over from the run which i use to kill everything on screen. Typically the screen is filled with enemies. Timing, and knowledge of the song, is important as spamming too soon (or in too quick repetition) may make you miss the last wave of enemies spawning in (thus points!). However firing them too late will not kill all of them, also make you miss out on a lot of points. Positioning is important as the blast radius of the bomb will not reach the whole screen right before the end of the song. Always ram ships with the (super bomb) shield as well, especially if they are spawning. Practice makes perfect.
The end of a song is a crucial part, aim for an empty screen. It can often cost/gain you a world record. If possible time it to get a big multiplier drop when capped before you start clearing the screen.

Using Super bomb there are 2 aspects about using the bomb. The damage of the bomb itself that fires "photons" radiating out from where you are. This is nice when there are many enemies on the screen. However be careful it does NOT penetrate shields.
More important is the shield you get, it works differently from the Reflect Shield in that it deals a lot of damage when touching enemies if the super bomb is properly configured in your armory). It even ignores shields! While shielded ramming enemies will kill them, i use it to snipe none standard enemies i want to kill. You can easily kill 4-8 enemies close together by just ramming them. However some enemies are immune to this type of damage.

Using Reflect shield use to avoiding death or re-positioning yourself. It is a defensive weapon and effectively an additional life when used well. When the screen is crowded and you have trouble clearing it using a reflect shield is often the only way of staying alive. It can be used to reflect photons for extra damage, or EMP, but to me that is an afterthought.

Dare deviling if there is downtime, e.g. asteroid fields, or after clearing the screen do some dare devils for additional multiplier. See also "Start of the song", same applies. When at the multiplier cap this becomes less important.

Death if you have died kill stuff ASAP to get your power and color back to full ASAP (and nothing more since they replace multiplier drops + you get less score until both are full). Due to the mother-ship you start both power+color at 100%. Death does not automatically mean a ruined run but it diminishes your chances as you also lose multiplier. For a highly contested world record it means a restart.

Beat hazard effectively becomes a bullet hell twin stick shooter with these strategies.

The strategies described here are what i use to improve my scores, that does not mean there are no OTHER or ADDITIONAL ways of improving your score.

You cannot achieve monster scores on any song, it really depends on spawn-set (number, type, ... of enemies) of the song.

If you want to see examples on how one of the best players plays the game have a look at Wuke's YouTube channel. For example Wuke these strategies all at once (to the extreme):
(do not be discouraged if this is above your skill level but try to recognize the strategies and try to apply them yourself even if you have to kill stuff earlier that he did)

Join Beat Hazard Discord[discord.com]!

Note: this guide is a bit similar to Wuke's guide as a) i have developed a similar play style b) i have taken strategies from him. (unfortunately my scores are not as high)